A review of Marx's Das Kapital; a biography - From Sam to Karl, via Francis
Tawfiq Chahboune
Many
a book has been interrupted by something from the Wodehouse canon. The reverse
- Wodehouse supplanted by, well, anything - is, or should I say was,
non-existent. For those who are interested, I leave Sam rescuing a kitten from
a tree. (Inexplicably, Sam the Sudden is Plum’s most favoured creation). The
interruption to Sam’s heroics resulted from Francis Wheen’s slim volume Marx’s
Das Kapital A Biography hitting the bookshops. Incidentally, to my horror, the
first thing that caught my eye, on opening Wheen’s new book, was the fact that
P.J. O’Rourke, the John Updike of political humour (in case you missed it,
that was not a compliment), has written, as part of Atlantic Books “Books that
Shook the World” series, a biography of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
Prediction: in the same way that our passionate PM has understood Michael
Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy, Pineapple Juice O’Rourke has understood
Smith’s magnus opus. Would it be libellous for me to put forward the
contention that P.J. does not even own a copy of Smith’s treatise and is,
instead, turning his unmighty talents from the “journalism” aimed at a
Neanderthal-brow readership to intellectual history so as to be “taken
seriously”? If it is, I’ll see you in court, Pineapple Juice.
Marx’s Das Kapital A Biography? It was the last two words that attracted me: A
Biography. And so to a little background. Wheen’s biography of Tom Driberg, a
name I was completely unacquainted with, was delightful. Meanwhile, Karl Marx,
Wheen’s follow-up autobiographical subject, is…perhaps it is best to stop now
and try not to scour my thesaurus for superlatives…no, that will not do… but
resist - resist! - the draw of the OET. It was near perfection (ha, no need
for a thesaurus). Near? Well, yes, just. Indeed, I could not help but recall
Joseph Heller: “When I read something saying I’ve not done anything as good as
Catch-22 I’m tempted to reply, “Who has?’”. Is it possible for Wheen, or
indeed anyone, to match, let alone surpass, the standard set by Karl Marx?
Wheen’s next biography, if indeed it can be classified as such, Who Was Dr
Charlotte Bach? really must be read for oneself. The subject is far too weird
for me to summarise. It became a matter of some exchange with Paul Foot,
someone I usually refused to argue with. I loved the book; the great man did
not, to put it extremely mildly. A by the way lesson from Orwell: a good
writer does not become a bad writer because his politics aren’t yours. Euston
“you have a problem” Manifesto signature and nonsensical anti-Chomsky letters
aside, Wheen is an astoundingly accomplished writer.
The main criticism levelled at Karl Marx was that Wheen did not discuss the
subject matter of Das Kapital - capitalism - in sufficient detail. This is a
fair and justified criticism; otherwise, it is the perfect biography. Though
Wheen’s new effort is complimentary, is it complementary? Does this
“biography” complete Karl Marx? Apologies to Sir Humphrey Appleby, well, yes
and no. No, because it does not really live up to the billing. Wheen states
that Das Kapital is “a vast Gothic novel”, a “multilayered structure” that
“evades easy categorization”, a “subject which allowed him to mimic the loose
and disjointed style pioneered by [Laurence] Sterne” in Tristram Shandy and
best seen as a work of art. This is fascinating. It may well even be true.
Marx was so gifted, so brilliant, so imaginative that this may have been
partly his intention. There can be no argument with Wheen’s contention that
had Marx “wished to write a conventional economic treatise he would have done
so, but his ambition was far more audacious”. Although Wheen supplies the
ingredients, the recipe, the oven and lays the table, the proof of the pudding
is in the eating. The pudding, however, does not make an appearance.
DISCOVERING A NEW CONTINENT
Save the introduction, Marx’s
Das Kapital A Biography (henceforth A Biography) is nicely split into three
chapters: Gestation, Birth, Afterlife. The introduction is Wheen at his best -
the Balzac story is a joy. The end of the introduction is less joyous, just
plain odd: “It is deeply fitting that Marx never finished his masterpiece,”
writes Wheen, because it is “open-ended”. Now, really, is “open-ended” a
quality so attractive that it befits the sad incompletion of one of the most
illuminating works the human intellect has produced? Plainly, no, it is not.
Gestation essentially condenses the magisterial Karl Marx into some thirty
small pages. Freudians would have a field day with page 10: “In his youth
Hegel had been an idealistic supporter of the French Revolution, but by middle
age he had become comfortable and complaisant, believing that a truly mature
man should recognize ‘the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world
as he finds it’”. Et tu, Francis? What Marx ever saw in Hegel is one of life’s
mysteries. Hegel’s writings are utterly ridiculous and quite mad - probably
why the reactionary Michael Gove is so drawn to them. I was therefore
heartened that Wheen does not spend too much time on dialectics. Little known
fact: Marx never knew much less used the term dialectical materialism.
Marx, as any leftie will know, is the supreme polemicist. For example, the
first third (and last page) of the Communist Manifesto has yet to be
surpassed, although my copy is ruined by A.J.P. Taylor’s unimaginably stupid
introduction. Easy to forget too that Marx was one of the finest ever
journalists. Though he wasted his valuable time and energy on meat-headed
non-entities - imagine Chomsky writing a five-hundred-page “pamphlet”
ridiculing the weird-looking Stephen Pollard - Marx had the put-down, well,
down. On the same page as Wheen’s Freudian battle there is Marx’s jibe about
the “more noteworthy jackasses”. What would Marx have made of the shitstorian
Simon “Windbag” Montefiore? A jackass, no doubt. Worthy of a note? Really, why
bother? Why am I?
No matter how often one reads it, it is still impossible for me to suppress a
smile on reading Marx’s boast, in April 1851, that he was “so far advanced
that I will have finished the whole economic stuff in five weeks”. Famously,
“economic stuff” soon became “economic shit.” Wheen cannot - who would? - omit
what is my own favourite line from the Master: not entirely oblivious to the
blinding fact that Das Kapital is wildly overdue, Marx writes that “I shall
have finished about four weeks from now, having only just begun the actual
writing”. If Samuel Johnson had compiled his dictionary later, the definition
of cheek would have no possible competitor.
And so we come to chapter 2, Birth. I for one have long tried to answer
criticisms of Das Kapital with an altogether mediocre analogy. I would usually
compare Marx to, say, Newton or Darwin. Profoundly revolutionary ways of
looking at the world are seldom without inconsistencies, without
imperfections, without need of “modernization”, to use a word that only New
“Labour” could make so ghastly. Wheen has given me the best analogy yet,
courtesy of the Marxist political economist Michael Lebowitz: “The fact that
Marx brilliantly discovered a new continent does not mean that he correctly
mapped it all.” Why do so many “Marxists” find this so hard to accept?
Actually, Ralph Miliband’s Marxism and Politics is well worth reading on this
count, apart from Miliband’s unfunny joke that Lenin was a Marxist. Some silly
billy in the New Statesman has in Montefiore-fashion descended to the same
tripe that all the horrors of the modern world can be safely put down to Marx.
Surely only a matter of time before the neo-con-artists blame Marx for Al
Qaeda. Though Marxists don’t realise it (false consciousness, obviously!),
they are all “pro-fascist”. And since jihadis are apparently “fascists”, not
just something else, Marx, therefore, is the progenitor of “Islamo-fascism”.
QED.
Page 65 is quite possibly the most irritating page in the whole book.
Irritating because Wheen does not elaborate on something that is so
maddeningly gripping. Not quite in the league of Fermat’s exasperating claim
that “I have a truly marvellous proof of this proposition which this margin is
too narrow to contain”, but Marx’s contention that there is a capitalistic
economic model which, writes Wheen, “grows steadily without recurrent crises
and could in theory continue indefinitely” is certainly worth elaborating on.
Perhaps it is because I have read and reread this so many times in Wheen’s
Karl Marx and have still not got round to investigating it that I am so
annoyed.
It was the superb critic Edmund Wilson who wrote: “Marx is certainly the
greatest ironist since Swift, and has a good deal in common with him”. This
is, of course, too much, but it does give Wheen the opportunity to quote Marx
at his most savage and witty best. Although one can point to capitalism’s
productive capacities, one can do the same with crime:
A criminal produces crimes. If we look a little closer at the connection
between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid
ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also
criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal
law and in addition to this the inevitable book in which this same professor
throws his lectures onto the general market as “commodities”…
Needless to say, the “Windbag” Montefiore would not quite get it. Montefiore’s
Sisyphean struggle against intelligent thought is there for all to marvel at.
AFTERLIFE OR PURGATORY?
Afterlife, the final chapter,
will infuriate many on the “Left”. Not me, though. Presaging the worse
divisions that were to ensue, George Bernard Shaw showered praise on Marx
while H.G. Wells branded him a “stuffy, ego-centred and malicious theorist”.
What Wheen writes about Marx’s so-called heirs and disciples really ought to
be about as controversial as saying that the “War on Terror” is nothing but a
veil of respectability - “Enlightenment values” - to further entrench U.S.
power in the Middle East. Wheen gives Lenin and Trotsky a good kicking, but
not as good as the one I would have given half a chance. Even someone as
brilliant as Ralph Miliband was incapable of telling the truth about the
Bolsheviks.
Curiously, however, Trotsky, one of history’s great sociopaths, was
uncharacteristically honest when writing how little the Bolsheviks had to do
with the Russian revolution, before finally assuming power and massacring as
many lefties as they could get their hands on. Lenin, meanwhile, was not
merely a sociopath but a sociopath with a funny hat who took his pitiful
intellectual efforts altogether too seriously. Here, for instance, is Lenin on
the Marxist legacy: “Consequently, half a century later, none of the Marxists
understands Marx.” Like Lenin, Marx, when he wasn’t in the British Library or
enjoying picnics on Hampstead Heath, was conducting purges, shutting down
workers’ councils and shooting heroic revolutionaries in the back as they fled
across the ice - yes, I have a Kronstadt complex. (Before any Trot or Leninist
has the usual unhistorical “self-defence” fit, much of this was before the
imperial intervention.) Yes, how stupid of me not to have noticed the
similarity! Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot as disciples? This in no
afterlife; this is purgatory. Interesting that the same stupid “disciple”
standard is not applied to Adam Smith, for is there anything more mad than
Pinochet claiming to be his heir?
The book ends with a different afterlife predicted: “Far from being buried
under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, Marx may only now be emerging in his true
significance. He could yet become the most influential thinker of the
twenty-first century.” Possibly, but then what I call an “optimism of the
intellect and optimism of the will” will be required, something sorely lacking
by those who have faith in a vanguard party that will lead them to the
promised land. In any event, I wonder what Marx would have made of “Marxists”
cheerleading U.S. imperialism in the Middle East? Come to think of it, the
term “Marxist” is in itself a bit much. It is a demeaning description. I’ve
yet to meet a mathematician who claims to be a “Gaussian” (not the curve).
Was it worth putting Wodehouse away for an afternoon? To answer in the
affirmative is high praise indeed. Though I have reservations about certain
aspects of A Biography - Trots and Leninists, meanwhile, will consider Wheen
as bad as a Kronstadt sailor - the short answer is yes, sort of. Although it
can’t be too long before a host of Marxist economists ignore what is good
about this book and instead start grumbling that Wheen has not really made a
good fist of explaining Das Kapital, it is only fair to remember that Wheen is
not an economist. If you want a fine description of Marxist economics, read
Paul Sweezy (as well as Michael Lebowitz for where it may require updating).
If you want people to reconsider Marx, to block out the propaganda and read
what this extraordinary thinker has - not, had - to say, Wheen succeeds in
doing just that. For any leftie, that should be considered a mighty success.
Best to stop before this review becomes as long as the book under review! And
so back to Sam…
August 2006
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